Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Expressive Erasure

This week at the L Magazine, I review Justin Berry’s show Fissure and Facture at Interstate Projects. Like many of his contemporaries, Berry digitally manipulates book covers and screen captures to remove key parts of the image. Berry’s work seems more promising than most.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen an enormous amount of art made in the erased appropriated image genre. Artists like Paul Pfieffer, Cory Arcangel and even Dan Colen tackled the subject, and thanks to the ubiquity of digital images and cheap software we’re likely to see a lot more.

Justin Berry’s show Fissure and Facture at Interstate Projects is just one recent example, and is worthy of discussion in this context for its uneven success. When this show fails, it tells us something about the pitfalls of the genre, and when it succeeds it tells us why artists are drawn to it in the first place.